


Retrofitting a King

by ForbiddenArchive



Series: Fate/Grand Observation [1]
Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: Android Transformation, F/F, roboticization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 18:45:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18900475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForbiddenArchive/pseuds/ForbiddenArchive
Summary: Saber Alter enjoys a little chance encounter with a strange enemy. Includes a little character I cooked up myself. Likely going to reappear later, hence the title being a bit wonky.





	Retrofitting a King

**Author's Note:**

> As described in my latest Weekly Update on Patreon, here's a story I've kept in the back of my pocket for a while.

Within the depths of the space between time itself sat a small table, with a featureless mask with the inner face facing upward. Beside it laid a book and a pen, the pages untouched save for a single dot of spilt ink. Whoever had last touched the book clearly hadn't managed to gather their thought thoroughly enough to write what they wanted.

All of a sudden, the pen lifted itself off the table, as if carried by an immaterial hand. The tip was put to paper, and words were added to the lines within the book.

"Humanity continues to amaze. They dealt with Goetia, my former 'master', and saved the world from incineration. And yet, the more I look upon them, the more I realize they shouldn't be capable of such a feet. They're worthless on their own. If I had to guess, they gain some sort of cohesion the more of them gather together… Therefore, I must observe what kind of humans serve to amplify this cohesion. Only then, may I truly be satisfied with what I’ve been presented with.”

The pen fell to the floor, into the abyss below, as the immaterial figure picked up the simple mask, and raised it to where its head would be. As a soft sound of a mechanism locking into place rung throughout the infinite darkness, the figure finally gained its physical form. Standing in the middle of the endless eternity in the space that time forgot, was a simple woman with no discerning features that could make her stand out. The only feature that defined her was the mask that adorned her face… a mask with a number imprinted on the cheek

71.

\--

The lights shone down on the nighttime streets of the prison singularity within the streets of Shinjuku. Ruffians and troublemakers had been corralled into this modern city, regardless of their original time and place in the timeline. One such ruffian was the Altered King of Knights, Arturia Pendragon. More commonly known by the label ‘Saber Alter’, she was forced to spend time in this strange and abstract prison together with a fellow ‘Alter’ that had previously served as her Master’s enemy on two occasions.

How she got here wasn’t something that bothered her at the moment however. The silver-haired woman brushed a hand along the side of her head as she stared straight ahead, her black jacket blowing in the wind. A soft set of groans resounded behind her, belonging to the many budding yakuza members that she had managed to beat up on her little walk.

“You. You’re not like the others.” Saber Alter stated as she brandished her corrupted blade and pointed it straight ahead at a mysterious robed figure. “Move it, lest you join the rabble that tried to rob me like desperate peasants.”  The pale-skinned king commanded, the mana in the air crackling as she would make good on her threat should the figure disobey.

The figure, of course, decided to remain silent. Instead of obeying the prisoner’s commands, it instead spread out its arms, revealing a set of mechanical hands. As if responding to the figure’s gesture, a small horde of automata suddenly dropped out from the sky, their eyes quietly shimmering red as they entered combat positions.

The corrupted king of knights sneered as she held her sword with both of her hands, entering her own stance in response. “Figures, nobody seems to take a threat to heart in this place.” The monarch muttered to herself as she approached the horde, the mana in the air gathering around her blade.

The automata gleefully, if expressionlessly, rushed to their imminent demise, as they were one by one cut down by the servant. And yet whenever one fell, another three quickly replaced the fallen numbers. Sure, Arturia was able to take down several with one swing, but the numbers seemed almost infinite.

“Great, and I thought the police force in this place was bad enough…” She muttered to herself as she slid a hand along the length of her blade, causing the energy coating it to expand drastically. With just another swing of the elongated weapon, she managed to cleave the entire artificial army into ribbons, leaving only their robed master behind, who seemed no worse for wear despite just losing plenty of minions.

The energy that had coalesced in the altered servant’s blade dispersed and the weapon was once again pointed at the robed antagonist. “The next strike will remove your head. Talk, then disappear.” The thoroughly displeased looking king commanded as the sigils along the length of her sword started to glow. This threat was serious.

Unfortunately, while she was busy trying to threaten the one that had caused her walk to turn bothersome, she hadn’t noticed two more automata sneaking up behind her and wrapping their rigid limbs around her arms, promptly disarming her and leaving her at the mercy of her enemy. “R-Release me at once, you faceless dolls! You do not deserve to touch me!” The king roared with the ferocity of a lion, but emotion was powerless against the cold determination that fueled these mechanical frames.

The robed figure started its approach as the servant continued its struggles, only for the latter to notice something awfully familiar about the automata that held her captive. Their coloration was ever so slightly off, almost as if they were custom models, not unlike the doll that the foolish Phantom had constructed… The color combinations of red and white, and yellow and orange…

That’s when it hit her. They may look entirely like machines, but she had definitely seen their colors before. If the corrupted king of knights wasn’t mistaken, then the automata were fellow servants like her. Boudica, the Rider that had begrudgingly helped during the Septem Singularity… and Mata Hari, the Assassin that saved her master’s life during the wyvern-infested hell that was Orleans. How the two had turned into such mechanical forms, she did not know, but she didn’t like it one bit.

Alter’s gaze fell back upon the robed menace in front of her, only for her eyes to widen further. She knew the face she was staring at, all too well. Because it was her own. No, to be more precise, the face beneath the hood was the face of her older self. The Lancer variant that had caused both her son and her master trouble during the fog crisis in London. “You… Tell me, why are you three like this?! Answer me!” The panicked servant shouted at the bottom of her lungs, but her words did not reach them. If anything, her verbal struggles merely spurred on the mechanical mirror in front of her.

“Commencing Conversion.”

The mortal servant recoiled slightly as a thoroughly mechanized voice emitted from the part of the artificially recreated Lancer’s face where her mouth would usually reside, the shock of the absurdity of the situation leaving her vulnerable to the conversion process. A process that started rather painfully as she felt something snapping around her ankles, her wrists and even her throat.

Upon looking down, she noticed what had been forced onto her. A set of restraints with gears adorning the metal were now affixed to the aforementioned areas. Before she had much of a chance to struggle against these new binds however, she found herself completely devoid of the ability to move. Only her eyes were able to shoot back and forth to observe what was happening to her body, and the sight wasn’t pretty.

Her toes had fused together into a single pair of metallic nubs. Her feet had been trimmed down and made uniform with one another, as a plain grey metallic coating covered every inch of the former flesh. The same coating continued up her lower legs, until it reached her knees which had been replaced with a pair of ball joints to allow for simplified maneuverability. The rest of her legs faired no better, having been turned into equally dull metal that almost matched the legs of the automata that held her.

Her arms were next, and she was quick to discover that the pain she had felt before was the last thing she’d feel in her arms, as they were forcefully stretched out. Skin that was about to rupture was quickly replaced by the same dull metal that coated her lower body, and all joints were likewise replaced with balls, ending in her hands and fingers extending and sharpening into perfect killing tools. Her shoulders were on a set of double ball joints that would allow her to rotate her arms freely in any direction, allowing her to serve as a definitive killing machine, much like the ones she had just been mowing down.

After that came her torso. Her waist was quickly hollowed out internally, the death of her reproductive systems barely registering inside of her pain-dulled brain was the mechanical aspects spread upward. Her spine was replaced with further ball joints to allow for the simulation of rotation, while the only human thing still remaining ended up being her bosom. Her breasts, of all things, grew at least a couple of sized, resulting in a pair of fake-looking metallic balloons poking out from her chest.

“This… can’t be happening…” Arturia muttered to herself in complete disbelief, but as she was slowly able to squeeze her sharpened hands together, she knew this had to be true. Her fellow automata had let go of her, as the final steps of the transformation took place. She looked ahead one last time, into the ‘eyes’ of her alternate self, before something shut off inside of her mortal brain. The mechanizing process had progressed all the way up her neck, ending at her face.

Most of her defining features were quickly snuffed away by the way the metal pressed her cheeks inward, allowing for zero change in expression. Her mouth was hidden away by an additional faceplate, preventing her from ever directly speaking again, if she even managed to recover her mind from this process. Her eyes were tuned into solid slabs of colored metal that started to glow a dim red. The rest of her face took on the same dull grey shade as the rest of her body, leaving only her hair as the sole defining feature that would allow her to be identified.

With this, another automata stood before the robed Lancer. A moment after the process completed, a voice that sounded exactly like the one that had been emitted from her ‘mouth’ resounded from the same area on the converted king.

“Conversion Complete. Proceeding to the next target. Target confirmed as Jeanne D’Arc - Alter”

As the automata confirmed their next objective, somebody observed them from the rooftops. A masked feminine figure stood atop the rooftops of the modern prison, holding the same book and pen that she held within the depths of time itself. The events that had just transpired before her replaced freshly within her mind, and the tip of the pen slid across the pages as she wrote down her thoughts.

“With this, Humanity loses several leading figures to a faceless menace. Mechanical horrors take the place of mythological and historical leaders, leaving behind a forgotten legacy. Now, they will need new guidance… And I will certainly give them such.

After all, I know how humanity thinks. Only I would. I, the Duchess of Hell, Dantalian.”

With the last letters added to the pages of her book, the masked demon removed her mask… revealing the face of the corrupted King of Knights that had just succumbed to the robotic plague. Even if the servant had lost her identity, somebody had to pick up the slack… and thus, Arturia Pendragon became one of the many masks at Dantalian’s disposal. One… of many more to come.


End file.
